It's Silver Hill Village, 2012. On the twentieth day of the seventh moon Kwok Yun is making her way across the rice fields on her Flying Pigeon bicycle. Her world is turned upside down when she sights a UFThing - a spinning plate in the sky - and helps the Westerner in distress whom she discovers in the shadow of the alien craft. It's not long before the village is crawling with men from the National Security and Intelligence Agency armed with pointed questions. And when the Westerner that Kwok Yun saved repays her kindness with a large dollar cheque she becomes a local celebrity, albeit under constant surveillance.
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Editorial Reviews
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Guo's humour is bracingly ironic and tinderbox dry The Times An entertaining read with a distinctive voice - and her most ambitious work yet Financial Times The novel resonates in revelations of loss and pain Guardian A fast moving, barbed polemic...a writer to read, a writer who makes every word count Irish Times A breath of the freshest air imaginable. She cuts through the smog of hype and platitude Independent
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About the Author
Xiaolu Guo was born in a fishing village in south China. She studied film at the Beijing Film Academy and published six books in China before she moved to London in 2002. The English translation of Village of Stone (Chatto, 2004) was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize and nominated for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Her first novel written in English, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers was published by Chatto in 2007 and shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction. Xiaolu's film career continues to flourish; in 2007, she was Cannes Film Festival Cinefondation resident, based in Paris.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Quite strong,
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This review is from: UFO in Her Eyes (Hardcover)
A very strong and unique work, ambiguously science fiction. Set in China it focuses on the uneven and questionably beneficial process of modernization that hits one village. The framing is an investigation into possible UFO sitting that occurs in 2012. The substance or lack thereof the aliens remains highly vague, frustratingly so at times. The main premise of the work isn't developed beyond general suggestions, and to an extent this aspect proves a fundamental redirect, setting up a failure in genre terms. Creatively, though, the book isn't really about the aliens, instead it focuses on how the Chinese government's investigation promotes disorienting rate of modernization on a small rural village. The technological aspect doesn't go beyond the present day yet its focus on social dislocation and rapid alteration in circumstance touches at the core of the science fiction project.
The book takes a sort of psuedo-documentary approach, being a collection of interviews and officially collected documents. In that aspect it's similar to Tidhar's the Tel Aviv Dossier, although better in quality overall. In depth focus on a type of rapid and disorienting social transformation that strikes me as the kind of thing SF should depict more. There's also a nice undercurrent given in the dictatorial state methods used to collect the data of the narrative. In reading the book I was left unsure repeatedly on the balance of realism within it, how much of what was described was plausible as opposed to an extrapolation. Overall, though, on the strength of the writing and the core premise it appears as a unique and imaginative depiction that's also in line with some of the continuities at work in China today. Similar to and better than: The Tel Aviv Dossier by Lavie Tidhar Similar to and worse than: Air by Geoff Ryman
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